ParkourBot Can Do Parkour

We've seen all kinds of robotsthatareabletomaketheirwayupwalls, but few if any of them have been what you'd call dynamic. That is, those robots clamp themselves to something, move, clamp, and them move again. A dynamic robot is more like a gymnast, relying on motion and inertia to actively propel itself up using walls and other surfaces to its advantage.

ParkourBot, designed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Northwestern University, takes all the lessons they've learned from dynamic walking robots and brings it to the vertical dimension. Well, near vertical. At this point, the robot is being tested on an angled air table to simplify the system, and they're also cheating a little bit (their words!) by relying on a gyroscope to keep the robot from spinning around like a pinwheel.

So okay, it may not exactly be climbing buildings, but that's definitely the goal. The next step is to add variations and gaps in the walls to teach ParkourBot to adapt on the fly, and once it gets that figured out, removing the gyro will open up some exciting possibilities for actual jumping and leaping and climbing. ParkourBot, watch and learn.